SXSW film festival: The star of I Think You Should Leave brings a similar brand of comedy to this strange and genuinely funny film about a friendship breakup

Few adult experiences sting as much as a friendship breakup, a rejection in some ways more personal, hurtful and confusing than that of a romantic partner. And few actors are better equipped to mine the weird vulnerabilities, fixations and feelings of a platonic split like the cult comedy king Tim Robinson, co-creator and star of the Netflix sketch show I Think You Should Leave (ITYSL). Over three seasons, Robinson has built up a devoted in-the-know following for his situational comedy, generationally playing unrepentant characters with no impulse control or allegiance to social scripts, people whose untidy feelings derail otherwise normal situations into absurd tangles.

In other words, not the type of people to take rejection well. With Robinson as the unfortunate half of a buddy dump, Friendship, writer-director Andrew DeYoung’s strange and hilarious debut feature, spins comedy gold out the straight male loneliness epidemic. Robinson goes for broke as Craig, a typical ITYSL character: pathetic, awkward, estranged from social rituals, an oddball at once sweet and a little creepy. A guy baffled by the ease of other men and desperate for their approval, whose face displays the big emotions – anger, love, jealousy – in amusingly bold, bright primary colors.

Radhika Apte is terrific as a woman preparing to settle down with a shiftless husband she barely knows when her world goes awry

British-Indian film-maker Karan Kandhari makes a stylish and offbeat feature debut with a black-comic horror set in Mumbai, elegantly shot by Sverre Sørdal and designed by Shruti Gupte – and if it runs out of road a bit before the end, and can’t quite decide what the point of everything has been … well, we’ve had a lot of laugh-lines, shocks and ingenious sight gags along the way. With its deadpan drollery and rectilinear tableau scenes, Sister Midnight takes something from Wes Anderson and Jim Jarmusch and also – at its most alarming – something more from Polanski’s Repulsion.

The movie’s satirical theme is the horror of arranged marriage, or maybe the intimate horror of marriage full stop – the feeling of being trapped, of suddenly and mysteriously not knowing who or what your partner is, the delirious fear and hate that can boil up out of nowhere for your spouse and yourself. Radhika Apte plays Uma, a woman who has arrived in Mumbai to start life as a housewife after an arranged marriage, the groom having gone on ahead to where he has already established himself in what is to be their modest marital home. (Apte also played an arranged bride in Michael Winterbottom’s The Wedding Guest) The wedding itself has evidently already taken place, and her husband is Gopal (Ashok Pathak), an unprepossessing guy from her home village with whom she hasn’t really spoken since they were both children, and who now spends his leisure hours at home loafing around, not talking to his wife, watching TV and masturbating. “You used to be so sensitive!” complains Uma. “I was eight,” replies Gopal.

Burr also lashed out at ‘liberals’ who were fleeing the country ‘because of one guy with dyed hair plugs and a laminated face’

British comedian Dave Gorman joins Grace for another scrumptious helping of Comfort Eating. Across the noughties, Dave took the British comedy scene by storm, and is known for taking the mundane, adding some sparkle and creating an Edinburgh festival fringe show, a UK tour and a book. Now he is back with a reboot of Dave Gorman: Modern Life is Goodish. Dave recounts how his hero comedian Frank Skinner gave him his big break; how fish and chips equals celebration; and what he munches on to fuel his frequent all-night writing sessions

New episodes of Comfort Eating with Grace Dent will be released every Tuesday